Whirley Drink Works’ Cup Assembly Line Improvements

Overview

The purpose of this project was to help Whirley Industries Inc. determine what part of their A27 assembly line causes the most prominent downtimes and defects. Additionally, overproduction was looked at since it was the number one cause of their defects. Thus, these three items: downtime, defect and overproduction, were the focus of this project. The goal of this project was to ultimately increase the production availability and throughout, and to reduce the number of production defects.

Objectives

The main objective of this project was to increase production availability and decrease scrap. To do this, the team analyzed the available data about scrap, downtime, and overproduction as well as detailed observations of the line in order to make recommendations. The goals were to:

• Provide the production engineering team with a first approximation PFMEA
• Increase the product throughput by 10-20%
• Decreasing downtime by 10-20%

Approach

• Initial investigation of current state of the system
• Identified customer needs
• Determined target specifications
• Analyzed the system through a root cause analysis
  • Lean Waste Identification
  • Value Added Analysis
  • Fishbone Diagrams
• Generated 13 concepts
• Performed a concept screening and selection
• Performance evaluation on each concept
  • Strengths/Weaknesses
  • Costs
• Created a PFMEA
• Developed a descriptive trend analysis
• Updated standard work instructions for the handle welding machine

Outcomes

• PFMEA will need 1 hour in training
• Updated work instructions will need 0.5 hours of employee training
• Descriptive trend analysis describing production and forecasting demand